“Hymn to the Nile”

Context

It is almost impossible to read a modern book on Egypt without coming across the quotation “Egypt is the gift of the Nile.” This famous saying originated with the ancient Greek travel writer and historian Herodotus in about 455 BCE. His famous quote was as true three millennia earlier, at the dawn of Egyptian civilization, as it was in his time. In the thirty-fifth century BCE, the Nile was the heart of Egypt, and its yearly floods spread fertilized new soil through the fields much in the same way that blood circulates life-giving oxygen and nutrients through the body. This...

Nilometer visible at the feet of a woman on Elephantine Island (Library of Congress)